Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature Book

A revised edition of Madness Explained, Richard Bentall's groundbreaking classic on mental illness In Madness Explained, leading clinical psychologist Richard Bentall shatters the modern myths that surround psychosis. Is madness purely a medical condition that can be treated with drugs? Is there a clear dividing line between who is sane and who is insane? For this revised edition, he adds new material drawing on the recent advances in molecular genetics, new studies of the role of environment in psychosis, and important discoveries on early symptoms preceding illness, among other important developments in our understanding.'Madness Explained is a substantial, yet highly accessible work. Full of insight and humanity, it deserves a wide readership.' Sunday Times'Will give readers a glimpse both of answers to their own problems, and to questions about how the mind works' Independent MagazineRichard P. Bentall holds a Chair in Experimental Clinical Psychology at the University of Manchester. In 1989 he received the British Psychological Society's May Davidson Award for his contribution to the field of Clinical Psychology.

This text explains what madness is showing that it can be understood in psychological terms and that by studying it we can learn important insights about the normal mind. It argues that traditional approaches to madness must be abandoned in favour of a new approach which is more consistent with what we now know about the human mind. Over the last 100 years or so it has become so commonplace to regard madness simply as a medical condition that it has become difficult to think of it in any other way. Bentall argues instead that delusions hallucinations and other unusual behaviours are best understood psychologically and that such experiences for the most part represent exaggerations of mental foibles to which we are all prone.

Is madness purely a medical condition that can be treated with drugs? Is there really a clear dividing line between mental health and mental illness - or is it not so easy to classify who is sane and who is insane? In Madness Explained leading clinical psychologist Richard Bentall shatters the modern myths that surround psychosis.

In Madness Explained clinical psychologist Richard Bentall shatters the modern myths that surround psychosis. This work argues that we cannot define madness as an illness to be cured like any other, that labels such as 'schizophrenia' and 'manic...